Today, let's celebrate the life of the American poet, Edna St Vincent Millay, born in 1892.
This beautiful sonnet is one of my favourite meditations on memory, and grief. I first came across it, fittingly enough, as a poster in an English department office at the beginning of my teaching career.
On the one hand, it could easily be read as the enduring grief of death. Alternatively, I have more of a connection with the poem as the expression of the aftermath of a break-up. The lines 'There are a hundred places where I fear / To go' vividly recalls my inability, at times in my life, to visit places that I only used to go to 'together' ...
The final quatrain is devastating: the idea that you try to forge new memories, new experiences, that you try to carve out a space for yourself alone, only to be defeated by memory, is a bleak prospect indeed.
Sonnet II
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane; But last year’s bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide. There are a hundred places where I fear To go,—so with his memory they brim. And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, “There is no memory of him here!” And so stand stricken, so remembering him. Source: https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/time-does-not-bring-relief-sonnet-ii-by-edna-st-vincent-millay
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